The Butterfly's Daughter - #TeaserTuesday and First Chapter / First Paragraph / Tuesday Intros

I enjoy books where I learn something while being engrossed in a good plot. In The Butterfly's Daughter, the subject was monarch butterflies. Mary Alice Monroe takes readers on a young woman's journey to fulfill her recently-deceased grandmother's wish for the two of them to go to Mexico. The granddaughter's quest parallels the flight of monarch butterflies in their annual migrations south. This is also a coming-of-age story. 

The book begins with a prologue, in which the grandmother tells an ancient fable to her 21-year-old granddaughter. Each chapter also begins with brief factual information about the monarch butterfly's migration. The action in Chapter One starts like this:

First Paragraph(s):
    Esperanza Avila had told the story so many times over the years that it was accepted as truth--even by herself. She'd meant only to blanket her granddaughter's frightening loss, not to mislead her. She saw the story she'd created as a safe, happy cocoon for her to grow up in.
    But in the end, she'd created a lie. Now she was caught in her own trap of deception. The only way out was to tell Luz the truth, no matter how painful that truth might be.

Teaser (from page 256 in trade paperback):
There were moments in the past three years of recovery when she felt such despair that she didn't think she could make it past another day without using. Moments like now. At these low points when her hands shook and her gut roiled, she'd go to the garden and put her hands deep into the earth. 

Genre: Contemporary Women's Fiction
Book Length: 382 Pages (trade paperback) plus a reader's group guide.
Amazon Link: The Butterfly's Daughter
I picked this up from the book exchange shelf at the senior center. It was published in 2012.

Synopsis: Every year, the monarch butterflies - las mariposas - fly more than two thousand miles on fragile wings to return to their winter home in Mexico. Now Luz Avila makes that same perilous journey south as she honors a vow to her beloved abuela - the grandmother who raised her - to return her ashes to her ancestral village. As Luz departs Milwaukee in a ramshackle old VW Bug, she finds her heart opened by a series of seemingly random encounters with remarkable women. In San Antonio, however, a startling revelation awaits: a reunion with a woman from her past. Together, the two cross into Mexico to await the returning monarchs in the little village Abuela called home, but they are also crossing a border that separates past from present . . . and truth from lies.

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by The PurpleBooker. Post two sentences from somewhere in a book you're reading. No spoilers, please! List the author and book title too.
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First Chapter/First Paragraph/Tuesday Intros is hosted by I'd Rather Be At The Beach. To participate, share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you're reading or thinking about reading soon.

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